The present invention relates to a festoon device that stores wires and feeds the wires to a bead core shaping device, for example, in a process of manufacturing bead cores used for vehicle tires.
Patent Document 1 discloses a conventional structure of this type of a festoon device, for example. This conventional structure includes a frame, which supports an upper pulley at an upper part of the frame to be rotational about an axis extending in the front-back direction of the frame. A lower part of the frame supports a lower pulley to be rotational about an axis extending in the front-back direction of the frame and selectively moved up and down. The frame rotationally supports two auxiliary pulleys, which are arranged at an upper part and a lower part on a lateral side in the frame width direction of the lower pulley. A wire that is coated with rubber by a die in a preparation process of manufacturing bead cores is looped around the auxiliary pulleys of the festoon device. After that, the wire is looped around the upper and lower pulleys multiple times, and then stored. The wire is fed to a bead core shaping device, which carries out a finishing process of manufacturing bead cores.
When the moving amount of the wire per unit time (hereinafter, simply referred to as a moving amount), which is fed from the festoon device to the bead core shaping device, becomes larger than the moving amount of the wire to be fed from the die to the festoon device, the lower pulley is moved up. In contrast, when the moving amount of the wire fed from the festoon device to the bead core shaping device becomes less than the moving amount of the wire fed from the die to the festoon device, the lower pulley is moved down. This absorbs the difference between the moving amount of the wire fed from the die, which carries out the preparation process, and the moving amount of the wire fed to the bead core shaping device, which carries out the finishing process. Thus, the tension of the wire is maintained at a constant level.
In the conventional festoon device, the frame supports the auxiliary pulleys, which are arranged on the lateral side in the frame width direction of the lower pulley. Thus, the conventional festoon device has a problem of increasing the frame width, thereby increasing the size of the festoon device.